The Genius Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a desk, chairs, a high-powered surgical light, a plastic tarp that I spread on the floor, cotton gloves, a magnifying glass, a space heater, floodlamps, and a computer. Nightly, through the end of winter and all of spring, Ruby and I sat with two or three boxes, sorting their contents as rapidly as possible while still noting pieces of exceptional quality, racking our brains to figure out how in the world to put up a show.
    In theory we could have—I don’t know—laminated them all. I suppose we could have done that. We could, I suppose, have laid them all out in a field in western Pennsylvania or the Hudson River Valley and affixed them to the ground, invited people to walk around the perimeter, like some big conceptual piece by Smithson. That would have been one option.
    But the logistics upset my stomach. Once sheathed in plastic, how well would the drawings align? Standing at the edge of the piece, would you be able to tell anything about its center, a hundred feet away? Was there even a center? What about glare, or wind, or warping? How could I possibly get people to make the drive?
    At the same time, I had to acknowledge that shown individually, the drawings lost much of their power. Which is not to say that they weren’t still arresting—they were. But splitting them up undermined what I believed to be one of the piece’s essential themes: connectedness, the unity of everything.
    I drew this conclusion soon after bringing the first box out of storage and laying out fifty or sixty of the drawings. When had I pieced them together, I saw immediately the true nature of Victor Cracke’s monumental work: it was a map.
    A map of reality as he perceived it. There were continents and boundary lines, nations and oceans and mountain ranges, all labeled in his meticulous handwriting. Phlenbendenum. Freddickville. Zythyrambiana, E. and W. The Green Qoptuag Forest, sending its fingers down into the Valley of Worthe, in which gleamed the golden cupola of the Cathedral Saint Gudrais and its Chamber of the Secret Sacred Heart—KEEP OUT!, he warned. Names ripped from Tolkien, or Aldous Huxley. Adding more panels, zooming out, you encountered other planets, other suns and galaxies. Wormholes led to distant parts of the map, alluded to by their numbers. Like the universe itself, the edges of the piece seemed to be speeding away from its unfathomable center.
    It was not just a map of space; it was a map of time as well. Places, figures, and scenes recurred in adjacent panels, moving in slow motion, like a comic book photocopied a thousand times, torn up, thrown into the air. Walking alongside the piece, reading its repetitions, one sensed the frustration at being unable to record everything, seen and imagined, in real time—the lines on the page always a few seconds out of date, and Victor sprinting to keep up.
     
     
    DOES ANY OF THAT MAKE SENSE? I’m not sure that it does. Great art does that: it cuts out your tongue. And Victor’s art is especially hard to describe, not just because of its size and complexity but because it was so damned weird. Everything was out of whack; everything repeated ad nauseam, giving rise to two unsettling sensations. On the one hand, once you got used to his visual vocabulary—the creatures, the wild proportions—you began to feel a profound sense of déjà vu, the strange becoming familiar, the way jargon starts to sound normal when everyone around you speaks it. On the other hand, the moment you stopped looking at the drawings, you were besieged by jamais vu, the familiar becoming strange, the way a regular word starts to sound wrong if you repeat it enough. I would look up from the drawing and notice Ruby playing with her tongue stud and the sound of it, the glint of it—her whole face—her knees tucked under her—her stark shadowed shape on the locker wall—all of it would somehow seem
wrong
. That is to say: the drawing was so massive and encompassing and hypnotic that it had a